Moose Murdered: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Broadway Bomb (8 page)

“The poor thing,” cooed Jane after hearing of Sue’s predicament. “I should send her some caramels.”

Marc had been obsessing over his own audition for weeks. Although his hair had begun to thin, he knew he still had the kind of apple-cheeked baby face that would allow him to convincingly play the teenage Stinky on stage. This kind of weird and silly character was tailor-made for his talents. John and Ricka had both loved his work in
My Great Dead Sister
, and he was, after all, the playwright’s best friend. Not to mention that the second page of the
Moose Murders
manuscript stated in no uncertain terms, “For Marc Castle.”

The pressure was slowly doing him in.

On the morning of his audition, he lay in bed for hours in a state of near catatonia. He arrived at the studio half an hour early and stood outside the building to chain-smoke three cigarettes (in case they weren’t allowed inside). He’d made himself a solemn promise to quit the habit whatever the outcome of this ordeal, so he figured he might as well live it up now. He rode the elevators upstairs and sat down in the waiting room with a good fifteen minutes to spare. The air conditioning wasn’t working, and he soon became aware that the “instant hair texture” he’d carefully applied to his scalp just before leaving his apartment was slowly dissolving into a moist, sticky mess.

“Marc Castle?” asked Amy, at the exact moment he’d begun to calculate the time it would take to do a little damage control in the men’s room. “We’re ready for you!”

Stuart (the only one besides Amy meeting Marc for the first time today) dutifully introduced him to each of us, and we all played along.

“Great play,” Marc muttered after shaking my hand.

“What?” asked Stuart, as if he’d just heard an obscenity.

“Great play,” repeated Marc, as Amy showed Stuart a copy of the play’s dedication page.

“Oh!” said Stuart. “So
you’re
the famous Marc Castle!”

Having now been given this grand introduction, it was time for the famous Marc Castle to dance for Grandma.

He started off well, getting a good laugh or two, but became increasingly flustered as his nerves took over. He forgot some of his bits (I knew this because we’d gone over all of them at his apartment days before). Mary McTigue seemed to have other things on her mind this afternoon, and her slow cue pickup screwed up Marc’s timing as well. He ended by giving her a big, lingering, idolatrous squeeze that got him another laugh, and compensated somewhat for the long stretches of silence in between.

I knew he hadn’t come anywhere near showing us his best work. But John and Ricka spent many minutes after he left the room commenting on his excellence in
My Great Dead Sister
. It was obvious they were both interested in him, and, so far, no other reading for Stinky had knocked anybody’s socks off.

I told him all this after the auditions, when I ran into him standing with his bike two blocks away from the studio. He was very distraught.

“I know I blew it, “he said. “I was so nervous I was physically ill. I should have had a beer beforehand. I’ve
never
been so nervous.”

“Listen,” I said, “round one is over. You just needed to get this first step out of the way.”

“They
hated
me.”

“They didn’t hate you. They already know how good you are—you should have heard them going on about you. They’re such fans it’s sickening.”

“So I’m getting a callback, right?”

“You know you are. And next time you’ll be able to concentrate on the performance instead of the
event
.”

The next audition wasn’t scheduled until the following Tuesday, which gave John time to fly to L.A. to hear Eve Arden read for the role of Hedda. By this time I’d become anesthetized to the effects of Hollywood chatter, so Stuart’s coup of setting up this meeting didn’t make that big of an impression on me. I was much more excited about a subsequent meeting John was scheduled to take with Dennis at Sardi’s on Tuesday morning before the auditions, the purpose of which was to once and for all smooth out all the rough edges of my production contract. To this day I still couldn’t tell you exactly what those rough edges might have been, but I assume they all had to do with making sure I would be receiving an ample portion of the spoils of Moose. My main interest was in relieving Dennis of his duties as my agent and securing his position as Nelson’s understudy before John beat me to the punch by hiring Brad O’Hare.

Dennis called me from the restaurant late Tuesday morning to tell me that he and John had reached a mutually satisfactory resolution and that my contract was now good to go.

“So,” I said to John when I saw him an hour later at the studio, “I guess I’m now legally yours.”

“Yes,” said John dryly, “and Dennis sleeps with the fishes.”

A little later, when I reached over to help myself to one of his breath mints, John cut me off short by slapping my hand. “I don’t know about this,” he said. “I didn’t speak to Dennis about it.”

Apparently the dust was still settling from this morning’s negotiations. I decided to wait until the hiatus between auditions and callbacks before making my next move in sculpting Dennis’s career.

These last few days of auditions could have provided fodder for a fairly decent “where-are-they-now?” documentary. Tall and skinny Carleton Carpenter, wearing a bow tie and saddle shoes, brought just the right balance of pathos and affability to the character of Howie Keene. Although he’d listed the 1950 film
Two Weeks with Love
on his resume, Marc had to clue me in later that this was where he’d sung “The Aba Daba Honeymoon” as a duet with Debbie Reynolds, a number I’d seen dozens of times thanks to its inclusion in
That’s Entertainment
(the collection of highlights from the golden age of MGM musicals). Grayson Hall, whom I had watched religiously as the beleaguered Dr. Julia Hoffman on TV’s supernatural soap
Dark Shadows
in the 60s, broke all semblance of formality by leaning over to squeeze my cheeks and exclaiming “You, I love!” She elaborated on this a bit by admitting “I’m afraid this is one of those plays that you either love or hate. As for me . . . well, here I am!” Roz Kelly, a.k.a. Pinky Tuscadero, Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli’s girlfriend on ABC’s
Happy Days
, impressed us more with the mock deco graphics of her resume than she did with her acting ability, and Sylvia Miles of
Midnight Cowboy
fame (“You were gonna ask
me
for money?”) waddled in like a bag lady (complete with several bags) and asked “Mind if I wear glasses?” before removing her psychedelic aviator goggles to reveal a Russian nesting doll collection of progressively smaller eyewear. The only note that John jotted down after this visit was “Forbidden Planet.”

John’s meeting with Eve had gone very well, and Stuart reported that he’d heard back from her manager Glenn and her husband Brooks, both of whom were pushing her to take the job. In the meantime, we continued to see a wide variety of alternative Heddas, including the lithe and looming Anne Francine, who’d replaced Bea Arthur as Vera Charles in the mid-60s Broadway production of
Mame
. Anne’s NBC sitcom
Harper Valley PTA
had just been cancelled, and she was eager to “return to her roots” on the New York stage.

“It was crap,” she told us, referring to the sitcom, “but it was eighteen-thousand-dollars-a-week crap.”

She asked a lot of questions about her character, and wondered if we really thought she could pull off the “sex kitten” transformation in the second act. “Sure! You bet! Go for it!” we cheered. Anne then clasped Mary McTigue’s hands and in great, stentorian tones exclaimed “We who are about to die salute you!”

Helen Gallagher, who’d worked with Anne Francine in
Mame
and had made a splash a few years later in
No, No, Nanette
, schlepped in as if she’d just been directed to take her place in line at the DMV. If I’d been asked to draw her as a comic strip character, I’d have made her eyes pencil dots, used a short, horizontal line for her mouth, and thrown in a dialogue balloon filled with dark little scribbles floating over her head.

“I swear,” whispered Ricka, leaning into me. “I feel like giving a class on how to walk into auditions.”

On the final day, we were moved to a higher floor of the building. The only thing different about the new room was its wall-to-wall carpeting, a feature that totally thwarted the two little tap dancers who hadn’t been able to join us for next week’s Little Gay marathon. Conversely, it proved to be quite an inspiration for the last Hedda we’d be seeing, playwright Arthur Miller’s baby sister, Joan Copeland.

I’d seen Joan play the wife of Danny Kaye’s Noah in the 1970 musical
Two by Two
, as well as the “bewitched, bothered, and bewildered” socialite Vera Simpson in the 1976 Broadway revival of
Pal Joey
. Both times I’d been taken by her elegance and quiet sophistication. Before Amy ushered her into the room that last afternoon, Stuart extolled the many virtues of Miss Copeland, advising us that she had become a confirmed recluse over the past few years, and that she rarely bothered to come in for auditions unless something had
particularly
incited her interest. Duly impressed by Stuart’s perfect impersonation of Erich von Stroheim, we all breathlessly awaited the entrance of our own Norma Desmond.

Joan had chosen the “sex kitten” (as Anne Francine had called it) transformational scene at the end of the play where Hedda and her son-in-law, Nelson, reveal their hidden lust for each other. When Mary McTigue was introduced as her scene partner, Joan was aghast.

“A woman?” she cried. “Oh, no, I can’t do this with a woman! You
are
a woman, aren’t you, dear?”

As Mary dramatically left the room to take one of her five-minute breaks that were becoming more frequent by the hour, Stuart bravely volunteered to act as her substitute. “Is she in tears?” asked Joan. “Did she just lose her job because of me?”

“It’s a cruel business,” said John.

Nothing could have prepared any of us for the unchained lunacy that followed. Apparently determined to dispel any notion that she was too highbrow to indulge in farce, Miss Copeland tore into Stuart as if he were a fresh slab of beef just tossed into her lair. She caressed him, she stroked him, she ran her fingers through his hair, and then, like Cyd Charisse, entangled her leg around his, grabbed hold of a chunk of his ass with one hand and gave him a good, long, exploratory grope in the crotch with the other—all the while undulating to a primal rhythm nobody else was privy to.

In a matter of seconds, Stuart’s face went from pale pink to fire engine red.

As a parting gesture, Joan took full advantage of the plush carpeting by dropping to her knees and burying her face deep into Stuart’s groin, growling and tugging at his trousers like a young dog with a chew toy.

I don’t think anybody heard a word of Joan’s dialogue. The roar of our laughter was so loud, in fact, that Mary cut her break short and came running back in to see what the hell was going on.

“I want to sincerely thank all of you for this special opportunity,” said Joan once we’d all quieted down. “You know where to reach me.”

We had to wait for Stuart to compose himself before letting in any of the few remaining actors. He’d withdrawn to the side of the room and was fanning himself with his script. “She grabbed my crotch,” he kept saying over and over. “She grabbed my crotch…with her teeth!”

“You need a cigarette?” asked John.

Nothing—and no
one
—came anywhere close to matching the intensity of Joan Copeland’s audition the rest of that last afternoon at the Bennett Studio. We saw Fisher Stevens and Brian Backer (two authentically teenage Stinky contenders), and a few more Dagmars—including Holland Taylor, who gave a great reading but struck me as being more of an edgy June Cleaver than Nurse Dagmar.

Stuart was called out of the room at the end of the day, and came back a few minutes later obviously trying to hide his glee. In true businesslike fashion, he asked John to join him outside for a minute.

After another few minutes they came back in, and John walked over to the table with his head lowered.